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Audio News Brief | February 15, 2013

The AudioGO Group completed its acquisition of Blackstone Audio from founders Craig and Michelle Black, effective December 27, 2012, adding Blackstone’s 5,000-title catalog to its existing 10,000 audiobook offerings, some 4,000 of which are available to libraries. Craig Black was appointed to the group’s Board of Directors, and he and Michelle Black will remain as consultants. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.Josh Stanton will continue as president of Blackstone Audio and also serve as CEO of the combined North American Operations, which will be based on Blackstone’s home turf of Ashland, OR.Mike Bowen, CEO of AudioGO, will serve as CEO of the combined group, based in Bath, England. Michael Kuhn will remain nonexecutive chair of the group. Mike Desrosiers was appointed CFO of North American Operations; Heather Johnson will remain CFO of Blackstone Audio.—Meredith Schwartz

The Library of Congress (LC) January 9 announced the acquisition of an audio archive of 15 years’ worth of athlete interviews from the radio network program Sports Byline USA, recorded between 1988 and 2003. LC said that the acquisition “marks the beginning of a three-year collaboration with the program’s producers to preserve these historic interviews and to make them available for listening on a streaming basis free to the public on the library’s website. Programs produced from 2004 to 2014 will be added to the collection over the next two years.”Highlights from the candid interviews conducted by Sports Byline USA’s Emmy Award–winning host Ron Barr include Mickey Mantle discussing his father’s early death and his alcoholism (1994), Willie Mays on his impact on baseball (1988), and Bill Russell setting the record straight about his relationship with fellow NBA great Wilt Chamberlain (2001). The interviews will be digitally preserved at LC’s Packard Campus for Audiovisual Conservation in Culpeper, VA. The Sports Byline collection will join the facility’s extensive holdings of sports recordings, which include Clem McCarthy’s classic calls of the Joe Louis–Max Schmeling rematch (1938) and the match race between Seabiscuit and War Admiral (1938), as well as many broadcasts featuring such sportscasting notables as Bill Stearns and Mel Allen.—Mike Rogers